[sna1l]

I think the problem with the promotion culture is that you can't demote someone after they've been promoted. If you just focus on showing impact and cross team projects, your engineers will naturally build more complex projects than needed to hit those targets. The key is to track the long term maintainability and quality of the systems built. E.g. time to land diffs, incidents, performance metrics, etc. If a system starts to quickly fail these things or don't last then it is a pretty good sign that the project wasn't actually built well. Things aren't always under a single person's control but a lot of people will work on a big complex (seemingly good) project and then bounce after they've gotten their promo.

I do think there is a balance though because at a lot of startups the incentive is to just crank out a lot of product code but not really think about multiplier type work.